Thursday, June 30, 2011

On at least 3 occasions (that I know of), an E-mail message I've sent has not been directed to its recipient(s) by the MobileMe SMTP server. This is not a simple glitch; I've resent the exact same messages several times, and they never make it through in their original form. If I edit the messages and remove certain words or phrases, they do get sent. It doesn't matter whether I use Mailsmith, Mail, or the MobileMe Web interface: messages containing the original text do not make it past the server.

In one case, removal of the phrase 'growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels' allowed an E-mail message which had been blocked to be sent. Most recently, an E-mail I was sending regarding the growing unrest in Greece has been blocked.It's fairly clear to me that Apple is silently filtering outgoing E-mail; no notice is given when a message is dropped. On what grounds they feel it reasonable to do this and using what criteria are not clear to me, but, as far as I'm concerned, there is simply no justification for this policy.

I contacted Apple support about this problem, and the tech on the other end went away for a day and eventually came back and told me the message I wanted to send would now make it through. And it did. But they did not do what I requested, which was to disable the outgoing filtering, because a couple of weeks later, the same thing has happened.

I intend to contact Apple support again, but this will be the last time. I intend to find an independent server and obtain my own domain and services independent of Apple, for the first time in over a decade. This is unfortunate, as I've rather enjoyed having my .mac E-mail address, but given Apple's recent authoritarian tendencies in this and other areas, I no longer see any reason to continue supporting them except where absolutely necessary.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Monday, June 13, 2011

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Thursday, June 09, 2011

I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn’s widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states’ rights, minus the “right to own people” part.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

That enables a lot of app-specific features to be universally applied. Since Apple is making the APIs for iCloud storage and sync available to all its developers, it should offer an impressive editing experience from iPhone to iPad to Mac or PC and back (assuming the app has a Mac/Windows counterpart). It should allow data and document access to be seamless. And with the sync capabilities of iCloud baked in, it should also be effortless ; there's no need to move a file using some other app or a clunky Web-based upload form.

On the other hand, your actual access to documents becomes more limited. You need to have specific apps on each device and you need to access your stored documents using Apple's solutions. In other words, it's a more closed system.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Apple's solution is to put data, and the ferrying process, in the cloud, providing a system where devices effectively become vessels. You buy a device from a store, plug in your Apple ID, and it syncs up with iCloud to tweak every setting, add every song, and every app just as it was on your other devices.

But this big solution still centers on a walled garden approach that critics have taken aim at with the company's other products. You're fine as long as you're in Apple's ecosystem, but step out and your data does not come along for the ride. In other words, Apple's replaced one set of data behaviors with another.